Wobegon boy, p.4
Wobegon Boy, page 4
“Come over for dinner,” I said. “I’ll cook.”
“How do I know you’re not the sort of man who likes to tie women to a bed and drip hot candle wax on them?” she said.
I said that we Norwegians would never waste candles like that.
I walked her into the chapel and around the ambulatory behind the altar, and kissed her again, and recited, “‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments,’” learned years ago for Mr. Tuomey’s sophomore English class, right up through “‘It is the star to every wandering bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.’” And then she kissed me. She took my head in both her hands and rubbed her lips along mine and slipped her tongue into my mouth and touched the front of my trousers. Lightly. But it boomed, it set off depth charges.
“What can I get you for dinner?” I said.
“I’d like you,” she said, “but I’m leaving for Chicago early tomorrow.”
“My favorite city,” I said. “I’ll come and show you around.”
The next day, I ordered a ticket for Chicago and reserved a room at the Palmer House and told Marian MacKay I was sick. “Right,” she said. “Sure.” I drove to the Syracuse airport and flew west. I met Alida for drinks at the Drake, where she was staying. The following morning, I met her at the Women’s Club, where she was on a panel discussing “Gender Models of the Post-Patriarchal Era,” at which Alida said, in an innocent voice, “You know, there are generational differences that are greater than any gender differences I am aware of. Women of my generation are not obsessively angry at men, we do not hold them responsible for our lives. Period.” A storm of fury descended on her head! Dowagers in straw hats hissed at her, and one panelist said, “That is the cruelest remark,” and talked about her mother and her struggles in the trade union movement and got weepy, and Alida smiled at me sweetly and crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue.
I took her to lunch and then to an interview with Studs Terkel. The two of them yakked about Darrow and Altgeld and Sandburg and Dreiser and the Haymarket bomb and the whole bloody history of Chicago radicalism, and I sat in the corner of the studio, wishing Terkel would hurry up and turn on the damn tape recorder and get the show on the road. Terkel kept relighting his cigar and talking his odd patois, like a bookie who had grown up reading James Joyce, and afterward Alida and I took a cab back to the hotel. Her hotel. We stood on the curb, under the brown awning. I asked if she wanted to look at architecture or take in a Sox game or go to dinner. She said, “What’s wrong with going to my room and having sex?”
So I checked out of the Palmer House and moved into her room. It was one perfect day after another, five of them, and she kept calling New York and canceling things. The glory of first love, when a mortal man is filled with grace, and even silence is symphonic. Then I took a week of vacation and flew to New York with her. I cooked, did laundry, cleaned her apartment, was relentlessly good-humored, did my best to be irresistible, and, at the end, thought she seemed a little grateful to see me go. But a few days later, I got a note saying there was nobody in the world she would rather be with than me, she was longing for me, starving for me, she hoped I felt the same way about her, if I didn’t she would be too sad for words.
She was, simply, the love of my life. She had turned up at a party, and now I didn’t care if I ever gave a party again. She was it. No question. The advantage of a restrictive Lutheran upbringing is that it heightens the pleasure of love when you eventually get around to it, and Alida was a love worth waiting for. She was the woman to keep. She was smart and sweet and passionate, and also something of a princess, I found out. She could not tolerate background music. She did not drink out of plastic or paper containers. She took two showers every day and put on fresh underwear. She smoked two cigarettes in the evening and had one glass of wine, never more. She took a Walkman to bed, in case of insomnia in the wee hours, and the earpiece had to be in her left ear and the radio under the pillow, tuned to the BBC Overnight Service. I had to take my shoes off by the door—she could not bear to feel grit under her feet—and I could not clip my nails in her presence (gross!) and she could not abide the thought of nose-picking.
“You don’t do it, do you?” she said. “I mean, not even alone in the bathroom. You don’t stand at the sink and fish around for boogers, do you? Tell me you don’t.”
I told her I hadn’t put my finger in my nose since I was in Boy Scouts. That I blew my nose with a tissue, the same as anyone else. It was a lie, but it put her mind at rest.
She didn’t mind belching, was a connoisseur of it, in fact, and could bring up belches of such force she could articulate whole sentences with them—once, after a dinner at a Greek restaurant that included flaming cheese curds, she belched out “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote” in the elevator—but farting was beyond the pale, not even to be contemplated. If she heard even a whisper of a fart, she turned away and said, “Take that someplace else, thank you.” She emitted a few sweet ones during the night, which I savored in the morning when she threw aside the blankets. She wrinkled up her nose. “I hope you don’t think I did that,” she said.
She was intensely jealous and didn’t pretend otherwise; she could not bear to hear any reference to my previous loves, and so those chapters of my life had to be locked up. I didn’t mind hearing about Simon, her old professor at Bryn Mawr, with whom she had a romance for eight years, which ended when his wife died. But she could not tolerate the mention of my days in Minneapolis when I lived with Korlyss, or in Red Cliff with Jean, or my trip to Greece with Ellie the fall Jean and I weren’t speaking, or my affair with the dancer who did a month’s residency at St. James—all off-limits.
“But it was part of my life,” I said.
“Start a new one,” she said.
Frankly, it was not such a bad deal to herd all my old girlfriends into a closet and close the door. I had thought enough about them: the first infatuation, the compulsive phone calls, the joyful couplings, the last sour, jagged moments. Women who are your best pals suddenly turn into peasant gypsy girls, their trust broken, their bodies defiled, their lives ruined by you, you big booger-boo. Sweet Korlyss, the night before she left, hurled wineglasses, one by one, at the back door, and tore my high school graduation picture to shreds, and lay on the couch sobbing. I had stolen the best years of her life and her only chance for happiness. If Alida did not want to look in that closet, well, fine, I didn’t need to either. The past receded to a pale shadow when I was with her. She corrected my grammatical errors, which irritated me, and she knew so much and didn’t hesitate to explain things, and that could be trying, and she was, I thought, a tiny bit self-centered—but it didn’t matter: none of her personality seemed to be for effect. She was genuinely, utterly herself. She bounced on the balls of her feet. She whistled beautifully. She threw a softball accurately. She was an appreciative lover—she liked it when I went out of my way. I looked into her eyes and thought, If I could live within that gaze, I would be a happy man.
In Chicago, the weekend we became lovers at the Drake Hotel, we walked along the lakeshore to the Field Museum, and there she saw a replica of a sailing ship and stopped. “My great-great-grandfather owned a fleet of four clipper ships just like that one,” she said. “He sailed out of Nantucket and traded in tea and ginger. Ezekiel Freeman—he had a black beard, and the look in his eye was like the crack of a whip. He was the last one in the family to earn any real money or amount to much.”
We sat on a bench in the sun, looking out over the beach and the placid lake. “All of his descendants turned out to be cranks and eccentrics,” she said. “His son, who was supposed to take over the business, ran away from the sea and founded a group called the Friends of Universal Reform, which attracted every crackpot on the Eastern Seaboard. Part of their credo was intellectual equality—the idea that everyone’s ideas were as interesting as anyone else’s—so the meetings went on for days. His name was Jack, and he changed it to Orion; he believed in the therapeutic effects of magnetism and slept every night with his head pointing north. Then his son, my grandfather, dedicated his life to proving that certain mounds and ridges in western Massachusetts were relics of a pre-Columbian Mayan culture. He camped out in the Berkshires, drawing maps of Mayan sites as they existed in his imagination. Not Mayan cities but places where Mayans sent their children for summer camp. When he was forty, he married the family’s Irish cook, which broke his parents’ hearts. They were freethinkers, but Catholicism was unacceptable, pure superstition, people praying to statues, so he was cut off from the family fortune and had to teach for a living, and so did his son, my father, and so do I. And that’s the story of the decline of the Freemans. Brute capitalism followed by helpless whimsy and intellectual drudgery.”
In the fall, I celebrated our love affair by having my house painted a deep gold with dark-green trim, and the front door a rich, deep red. Mr. Hall, the painting contractor, asked, “Are you sure?” and I was very sure, though when it was done, the effect was as if a parrot had settled in a flock of doves. A neighbor stopped as I was raking leaves and asked if I had gotten permission for the paint job. I said I didn’t know that permission was needed. The neighbor said he didn’t know either, he was only asking. “In some towns you need permission,” he said, wistfully.
I had the kitchen painted a lighter gold and the floor painted green. Then the living room, pale blue. And the bedroom, pale salmon.
She came up the next weekend and walked around the yard, her hands clasped behind her back, and said, “I’ve never seen a house like this. Gold … green … a red door.”
“In Norway they loved bright color,” I said. “Because of the long winter. They’d have blue floors and green walls, or lilac, or pink, or yellow—and they loved gold, like this, this mottled orangy-gold. It was only when they got to America that they painted all their houses white. They got that from your people, the Puritans. My people were only trying to fit in.”
“The Freemans were not Puritans, we were spice merchants. We sold pepper and ginger to Puritans; it was one of their few pleasures.”
It was a sweet October day. We ate lunch on the porch. A bluechecked cloth on the table, poached salmon and a cucumber salad. And a glass bowl of cherries. We sat down, and a minute later, the neighbor shut off his lawn mower, and we could hear the radio in the kitchen, a Haydn string quartet. “I hope you know I love you,” she said.
We walked to the Dairy Queen, and she told me about Bolle Balestrand’s memoir. A Norwegian professor at Columbia had translated two chapters for her. She said that Balestrand was a sort of neuropath, who treated nervous disorders with colonics, herbal teas, and hot and cold baths. He arrived in Boston in 1852, a deckhand on a British frigate, and jumped ship and snuck away to Concord, pretending to be a reformed slave trader, and was taken in by the Alcotts and Emersons, the whole Transcendentalist crowd. They were terribly intellectual people, capable of looking into their cereal bowls and seeing the spirit of the universe. Their shadows, their heartburn, the ringing in their ears—everything pointed to a deeper Truth. An ice-cold bath was to them a religious epiphany. Emerson was the first to take one, and after he raved about it, everyone followed suit. Balestrand administered a powerful enema, which flushed you out, then he steamed you for twenty minutes and plunged you into forty-degree water, after which you drank a quart of hot tea made from dried poppies, and you walked out feeling like an angel. Constipation was epidemic in the nineteenth century, because people were afraid to drink the water. That’s why Thoreau raised beans at Walden; when he said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” he was referring to a specific problem.
Balestrand got things moving again, and the opiate tea cured all aches and pains, and he became the darling of the New England intelligentsia. Emerson introduced him to Whitman, and he gave Whitman the treatment, and Whitman wrote a poem that began:
Scented effluence of my being
Rushing from me so candid and rich and redolent of the earth
And O so much of it!
How much I contain’d! I contain’d rivers and the swamps of rivers, the muck and mire of deltas,
A thousand acres of corn could be raised on what was in me!
I could feed multitudes!
Whitman took him to Washington and introduced him to Abraham Lincoln, who came to see him every week for almost two years. Lincoln suffered from insomnia due to nightmares—bells tolling, the sky black with smoke, horses rearing and plunging off bridges, women shrieking at the sight of dead men left on their doorsteps, widows dancing with widows—and he was convinced that history would revile him as a bloodthirsty baboon who had drowned America’s innocence in blood. Balestrand steamed Lincoln and poured cold water on him and dosed him with opiate tea, and the Great Emancipator sat, stunned, dripping, his hair pasted to his head, mournful as a wet dog. One day, Lincoln was agitated about going to Gettysburg to give a speech. He said, “The thought of the butcher returning to the scene of the crime to speak over the victims! What jokes God plays on me!” And Balestrand showed Lincoln a speech that he, a humble immigrant, had delivered to the Neuropathic Society, about the obligation of the living to dedicate themselves to the unfinished work of those who had gone before and about neuropathy being the medicine of the people, by the people, for the people. Lincoln was grateful. He brought Balestrand the first draft of the Gettysburg Address, and Balestrand persuaded him to drop a long passage about the need for education in meeting the challenge of rapid social change.
“Did Balestrand ever claim credit for it?” I asked.
“Only in his journal. Along with Lincoln’s check for ten dollars and his note, saying, ‘Do you not think the phrase the world will little note nor long remember what we say here is somewhat silly? Why put ideas in their heads?’”
Nineteenth-century American history was a field as crowded as the Boston Marathon, but Alida had risen fast at Columbia, was well-liked in her department. I met her at her office once, when she was talking to her chairman, a short, heavy man with a gray crew cut and a bow tie, who pumped my hand and said, “If you take her away, I will plunge a knife into your heart. Do you hear?” Colleagues sought her opinion of their manuscripts, students smiled at her in the hallway and said hi. At lunch, in a walk-up Italian restaurant on 112th Street, she told me that she was in line to become a full professor when her book was finished.
“I got an offer from Berkeley,” she said, “and I showed it to my chairman and he made me a better offer.”
She had leapfrogged the feminists with their herstories, the progressive revisionists, the neorevisionists, the deconstructionists with their silly papers about history as pure text, wordplay, history as hissing wrist, as wistful hitting, as hidden story, stir-fry, antihistamine, and she had advanced despite hewing to an old school of thinking, wildly out of fashion, known as narrativism, which held that interpretation was a dead hand, a form of cartooning, and that narrative was All, the best filter of nonsense and political fluff, and that this was perfectly clear anytime you opened a book of history more than fifteen years old: the hermeneutics, the scholarly exegesis, the passages about “the viability of Eurocentric anathematization of postmodern nonpatriarchal normative injunctions,” were as interesting as a rotted log, and the only lively material was who said what to whom after they did what when with whoever the other people were.
“How can you have history without interpretation?” I asked.
“It’s a question of which comes first,” she said. “And after slogging through grad school and listening to professors straining for brilliance, a person comes to have a great respect for simple facts.”
“If you could reconstruct one day of Jefferson’s life, in which he figured up his accounts, wrote a letter to a daughter, played his violin, inspected his plantation and talked to his field hands, took a bath and read a book, and went to a dinner and danced and flirted with someone else’s wife, you would know more about the eighteenth century than from reading every book on the subject. Historians rush to make judgments, when we should be digging down deeper into the plain facts that the past has left for us. The past longs to be remembered! The past is constantly sending us letters, dropping notes in our path, phoning us up, trying to make dates for lunch. The past has no wish to die. All the people I try to write about—Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Custer—they were jealous of their reputations to the day they died, but death released them from the fear of public opinion, and now they want to be naked and visible, and undressing them is what motivates me, nothing less.”
Her voice rose as she said it. People glanced her way. I was pretty sure I was hearing a passage from a lecture, but that was okay by me. I was touched that she wanted to impress me. She must be in love, I thought.
FOUR
All That Is Essential
Somewhere in the fall, what was between her and me ceased to be an affair and turned into an enduring romance, and we became two birds who know the way back to each other. Briefly, in November, she pulled back. “Is this going too fast?” she said on the phone. “I think this is going too fast.” When she said goodbye, I wasn’t sure if I would see her again or not. I imagined not. I set the phone down and sat in the kitchen and contemplated the farewell letter she would write to me, and as the sun went down and the house got dark, I promised myself that if she called it quits, I would not file an appeal, or plead for leniency. And the next day she called and said that she missed me and would come on Saturday.
We settled into a routine of every other weekend, at her apartment on Riverside Drive and 100th, looking out over the trees to the Hudson River, or my house in Red Cliff: we made love and talked late into the night, she smoked her two cigarettes; we slept, I curled behind her, my arm across her belly, being careful not to disturb the cord of the Walkman; and I awoke, she curled behind me, her arm over me; and we got up and brushed our teeth, showered, put on clean underwear, drank our coffee from china cups, spoke grammatically, avoided background music, she belched a line from a poem, we walked, we talked, we made love, she showered; and then I kissed her goodbye and her eyes filled with tears and we parted.
